You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down (10 page)

She is sitting with her back against the headboard of the bed so that her breasts hang down. This increases sensation in her already very aroused nipples. He crawls up to her on all fours like a gentle but ravenous bear and begins to nuzzle her. He nuzzles and nuzzles until her nipples virtually aim themselves at him. He takes one into his mouth. She begins to flow.

But the flow stops.

Once he said to her: “I could be turned on by bondage.” No, he said “by ‘a little
light
bondage.’” She had told him of a fantasy in which she lay helpless, bound, waiting for the pleasure worse than death.

There is no plot this time. No story of an improbable friendship down South, no goldilocks from the Midwestern plains. Just page after page of women: yellow, red, white, brown, black
[she had let him tie her up very loosely once; it was not like her fantasy at all. She had wanted to hold him, caress him, snuggle and cuddle]
bound, often gagged. Their legs open. Forced to their knees.

He is massaging the back of her neck, her shoulders. Her buttocks. The backs of her thighs. She has bent over a hot typewriter all day and is tired. She sinks into the feeling of being desired and pampered. Valued. Loved. Soon she is completely restored. Alert. She decides to make love to him. She turns over. She cradles his head in her arms. Kisses his forehead. His eyes. Massages his scalp with her fingers. Buries her nose in his neck. Kisses his neck. Caresses his chest. Flicks his nipples, back and forth, with her tongue. Slowly she moves down his body. His penis (which he thinks should not be called “penis”—“a white boy’s word”; he prefers “cock”) is standing. She takes it—she is on her knees—into her mouth. She gags.

The long-term accommodation that protects marriage and other such relationships is, she knows, forgetfulness. She will forget what turns him on.

“No, no,” he says, very sorry he has shown her his collection; in fact, vowing passionately to throw it away. “The point is for
you
to be turned on by it
too
!”

She thinks of the lovely black girl—whom she actually thinks of as her friend Fannie—and is horrified. What is Fannie doing in such company? she wonders. She panics as he is entering her. Wait! she says, and races to the phone.

The phone rings and rings.

Her friend Fannie is an out-of-work saleswoman. She is also a lesbian. She proceeds to write in her head a real story about Fannie based on what she knows. Her lover at work on her body the whole time.

Fannie and Laura share a tiny loft apartment. They almost never make love. Not because they are not loving—they do a lot of caressing and soothing—but they are so guilty about what they feel that sexuality has more or less dried up.
[She feels her own juices drying up at this thought.]

They have both been out of work for a long time. Laura’s mother is sick. Fannie’s young brother has entered Howard University. There is only Fannie to send him money for books, clothes and entertainment. Fannie is very pretty but basically unskilled in anything but selling, and salespersons by the thousands have been laid off in the recession. Unemployment is not enough.

But Fannie is really very beautiful. Men stop her on the street all the time to tell her so. It is the way they chose to tell her so, when she was barely pubescent, that makes her return curses for “compliments” even today.

But these men would still stop her on the street, offer her money “for a few hours’ work.”…

By now she has faked all kinds of things, and exhausted her lover. He is sound asleep. She races to Fannie and Laura’s apartment. Sits waiting for them on the stoop. Finally they come home from seeing a Woody Allen movie. They are in high spirits, and besides, because she shares part of her life with a man, care much less for her than she does for them. They yawn loudly, kiss her matronizingly on both cheeks, and send her home again.

Now, when he makes love to her, she tries to fit herself into the white-woman, two-black-men story. But who will she be? The men look like her brothers, Bobo and Charlie. She is disgusted, and worse, bored, by Bobo and Charlie. The white woman is like the young girl who, according to the
Times,
was seduced off a farm in Minnesota by a black pimp and turned out on 42nd Street. She cannot stop herself from thinking:
Poor: Ignorant: Sleazy: Depressing,
This does not excite or stimulate.

He watches her face as he makes expert love to her. He knows his technique is virtually flawless, but he thinks perhaps it can be improved. Is she moving less rhythmically under him? Does she seem distracted? There seems to be a separate activity in her body, to which she is attentive, and which is not connected to the current he is sending through his fingertips. He notices the fluttering at the corners of her eyelids. Her eyes could fly open at any moment, he thinks, and look objectively at him. He shudders. Holds her tight.

He thinks frantically of what she might be thinking of him. Realizes he is moving in her
desperately,
as if he is climbing the walls of a closed building. As if she reads his mind, she moans encouragingly. But it is a distracted moan—that offends him.

He bites the pillow over her head: Where
is
she? he thinks. Is she into fantasy or not?

He
must be.

He slips her into the role of “Fannie” with some hope. But nothing develops. As “Fannie” she refuses even to leave her Southern town. Won’t speak to, much less go down on, either of the two gays.

He races back and forth between an image of her bound and on her knees, to two black men and a white woman becoming acquainted outside a bar.

This does not help.

Besides, she is involved in the activity inside herself and holding him—nostalgically.

He feels himself sliding down the wall that is her body, and expelled from inside her.

Advancing Luna—and Ida B. Wells

I
MET
L
UNA
the summer of 1965 in Atlanta where we both attended a political conference and rally. It was designed to give us the courage, as temporary civil rights workers, to penetrate the small hamlets farther south. I had taken a bus from Sarah Lawrence in New York and gone back to Georgia, my home state, to try my hand at registering voters. It had become obvious from the high spirits and sense of almost divine purpose exhibited by black people that a revolution was going on, and I did not intend to miss it. Especially not this summery, student-studded version of it. And I thought it would be fun to spend some time on my own in the South.

Luna was sitting on the back of a pickup truck, waiting for someone to take her from Faith Baptist, where the rally was held, to whatever gracious black Negro home awaited her. I remember because someone who assumed I would also be traveling by pickup introduced us. I remember her face when I said, “No, no more back of pickup trucks for me. I know Atlanta well enough, I’ll walk.” She assumed of course (I guess) that I did not wish to ride beside her because she was white, and I was not curious enough about what she might have thought to explain it to her. And yet I was struck by her passivity, her
patience
as she sat on the truck alone and ignored, because someone had told her to wait there quietly until it was time to go.

This look of passively waiting for something changed very little over the years I knew her. It was only four or five years in all that I did. It seems longer, perhaps because we met at such an optimistic time in our lives. John Kennedy and Malcolm X had already been assassinated, but King had not been and Bobby Kennedy had not been. Then too, the lethal, bizarre elimination by death of this militant or that, exiles, flights to Cuba, shoot-outs between former Movement friends sundered forever by lies planted by the FBI, the gunning down of Mrs. Martin Luther King, Sr., as she played the Lord’s Prayer on the piano in her church (was her name Alberta?), were still in the happily unfathomable future.

We believed we could change America because we were young and bright and held ourselves
responsible
for changing it. We did not believe we would fail. That is what lent fervor (revivalist fervor, in fact; we would
revive
America!) to our songs, and lent sweetness to our friendships (in the beginning almost all interracial), and gave a wonderful fillip to our sex (which, too, in the beginning, was almost always interracial).

What first struck me about Luna when we later lived together was that she did not own a bra. This was curious to me, I suppose, because she also did not need one. Her chest was practically flat, her breasts like those of a child. Her face was round, and she suffered from acne. She carried with her always a tube of that “skin-colored” (if one’s skin is pink or eggshell) medication designed to dry up pimples. At the oddest times—waiting for a light to change, listening to voter registration instructions, talking about her father’s new girlfriend—she would apply the stuff, holding in her other hand a small brass mirror the size of her thumb, which she also carried for just this purpose.

We were assigned to work together in a small, rigidly segregated South Georgia town that the city fathers, incongruously and years ago, had named Freehold. Luna was slightly asthmatic and when overheated or nervous she breathed through her mouth. She wore her shoulder-length black hair with bangs to her eyebrows and the rest brushed behind her ears. Her eyes were brown and rather small. She was attractive, but just barely and with effort. Had she been the slightest bit overweight, for instance, she would have gone completely unnoticed, and would have faded into the background where, even in a revolution, fat people seem destined to go. I have a photograph of her sitting on the steps of a house in South Georgia. She is wearing tiny pearl earrings, a dark sleeveless shirt with Peter Pan collar, Bermuda shorts, and a pair of those East Indian sandals that seem to adhere to nothing but a big toe.

The summer of ’65 was as hot as any other in that part of the South. There was an abundance of flies and mosquitoes. Everyone complained about the heat and the flies and the hard work, but Luna complained less than the rest of us. She walked ten miles a day with me up and down those straight Georgia highways, stopping at every house that looked black (one could always tell in 1965) and asking whether anyone needed help with learning how to vote. The simple mechanics: writing one’s name, or making one’s “X” in the proper column. And then, though we were required to walk, everywhere, we were empowered to offer prospective registrants a car in which they might safely ride down to the county courthouse. And later to the polling places. Luna, almost overcome by the heat, breathing through her mouth like a dog, her hair plastered with sweat to her head, kept looking straight ahead, and walking as if the walking itself was her reward.

I don’t know if we accomplished much that summer. In retrospect, it seems not only minor, but irrelevant. A bunch of us, black and white, lived together. The black people who took us in were unfailingly hospitable and kind. I took them for granted in a way that now amazes me. I realize that at each and every house we visited I
assumed
hospitality, I
assumed
kindness. Luna was often startled by my “boldness.” If we walked up to a secluded farmhouse and half a dozen dogs ran up barking around our heels and a large black man with a shotgun could be seen whistling to himself under a tree, she would become nervous. I, on the other hand, felt free to yell at this stranger’s dogs, slap a couple of them on the nose, and call over to him about his hunting.

That month with Luna of approaching new black people every day taught me something about myself I had always suspected: I thought black people superior people. Not simply superior to white people, because even without thinking about it much, I assumed almost everyone was superior to them; but to everyone. Only white people, after all, would blow up a Sunday-school class and grin for television over their “victory,”
i.e.,
the death of four small black girls. Any atrocity, at any time, was expected from them. On the other hand, it never occurred to me that black people
could
treat Luna and me with anything but warmth and concern. Even their curiosity about the sudden influx into their midst of rather ignorant white and black Northerners was restrained and courteous. I was treated as a relative, Luna as a much welcomed guest.

Luna and I were taken in by a middle-aged couple and their young school-age daughter. The mother worked outside the house in a local canning factory, the father worked in the paper plant in nearby Augusta. Never did they speak of the danger they were in of losing their jobs over keeping us, and never did their small daughter show any fear that her house might be attacked by racists because we were there. Again, I did not expect this family to complain, no matter what happened to them because of us. Having understood the danger, they had assumed the risk. I did not think them particularly brave, merely typical.

I think Luna liked the smallness—only four rooms—of the house. It was in this house that she ridiculed her mother’s lack of taste. Her yellow-and-mauve house in Cleveland, the eleven rooms, the heated garage, the new car every year, her father’s inability to remain faithful to her mother, their divorce, the fight over the property, even more bitter than over the children. Her mother kept the house and the children. Her father kept the car and his new girlfriend, whom he wanted Luna to meet and “approve.” I could hardly imagine anyone disliking her mother so much. Everything Luna hated in her she summed up in three words:
“yellow and mauve.”

I have a second photograph of Luna and a group of us being bullied by a Georgia state trooper. This member of Georgia’s finest had followed us out into the deserted countryside to lecture us on how misplaced—in the South—was our energy, when “the Lord knew” the North (where he thought all of us lived, expressing disbelief that most of us were Georgians) was just as bad. (He had a point that I recognized even then, but it did not seem the point where we were.) Luna is looking up at him, her mouth slightly open as always, a somewhat dazed look on her face. I cannot detect fear on any of our faces, though we were all afraid. After all, 1965 was only a year after 1964 when three civil rights workers had been taken deep into a Mississippi forest by local officials and sadistically tortured and murdered. Luna almost always carried a flat black shoulder bag. She is standing with it against her side, her thumb in the strap.